Russia’s Supreme Court begins hearing to dissolve the country’s main NGO

Moscow, Nov 25 (EFE) .- The Supreme Court of Russia began today to evaluate the request of the Prosecutor’s Office to dissolve the main human rights organization in this country, Memorial, considered the voice of Soviet reprisals and rights violations humans in Russia, in a case that has provoked condemnation from international organizations and the West.
In the courtroom, chaired by Judge Alla Nazárova, journalists have been allowed at the beginning of the session, while subsequently they have had to follow the process in an adjacent room.
At the entrance of the court a long queue of dozens of people waited to enter the hearing and diplomats from a score of countries have attended the hearing, as confirmed to Efe by the press service of the Supreme Court.
The organization OVD-Info, specialized in the monitoring of arrests and the defense of detainees, reported two detainees, including a woman who carried a sign that read “Thank you Memorial, we do not forget” written on top of two photographs of two men.
The second detainee also carried a sign with the slogan “We are Memorial,” according to the same source.
The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office wants the Supreme to liquidate the International Society for History, Education, Charity and Human Rights (International Memorial), which is the “matrix” of its network of more than 50 organizations in Russia, six in Ukraine and each affiliate in Belgium, Germany, France, Italy and the Czech Republic.
The Moscow Prosecutor’s Office wants to do the same in a court in the capital with the Memorial Center for Human Rights, which has offices in four Russian regions.
On the 8th, Russia’s attorney general, Igor Krasnov, sent to the Supreme Court his request to liquidate International Memorial due to a “systemic violation” of the “law on foreign agents”, given that he has been a “foreign agent” since 2016.
Since 2019, this condition obliges him to include this label in every document, every post and every publication, even on social networks, for being accused of receiving foreign funding.
The organization has repeatedly claimed that the law was conceived as a tool to suppress independent organizations and insisted that it should be abolished.
“We believe that there is no legal basis for the liquidation of the International Memorial,” stressed the NGO, which considers the request of the Prosecutor’s Office “a political decision to destroy it.”
In the case of the Memorial Human Rights Center, well known for its work in defense of the persecuted in Chechnya, among others, it was declared a “foreign agent” in 2014.
The Moscow Prosecutor’s Office also wants to dissolve it for having allegedly found “linguistic and psychological signs that justify the activities of members of terrorist and extremist organizations such as Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami, Tablighi Jamaat, At-Takfir Wal Hijra and extremist organizations Artpodgotovka and Jehovah’s Witnesses. ”
A total of 62 academics, professors and members of the Russian Academy of Sciences have championed Memorial’s work, as have editors and the two Russians awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – the late Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev (1990) and the recently awarded Dmitri Murátov, editor of the newspaper Nóvaya Gazeta.
Gorbachev, whose grandparents were also retaliated, was joined by the widow of the Nobel Prize in Literature Alexandr Solzhenitsin (“Gulag Archipelago”), Natalia; the Yeltsin Center; Russian writer Ludmila Petrushévskaya, who gave up an award she received from Putin in 2002; the UN, Amnesty International, the US and the European Union (EU).